New WhiteHouse petition! Please sign.

There is a new petition up on whitehouse.gov
This petition aims to stop labeling ecigarettes as tobacco products.

These are the contents of the article.

"Electronic cigarettes and E-Juice (a blend of Propylene Glycol and Vegetable Glycerin which may or may not contain nicotine) are being wrongly labeled as tobacco products and therefore being subject to unjustified bans.There is no tobacco involved, just nicotine. Nicotine is a naturally occurring stimulant found in the nightshade family of plants.By labeling these electronic cigarette devices as tobacco products, they are being subject to bans which provide smokers little alternatives to quitting.Nicotine patches helped increase the quitting chance of smokers by 50-70%, but found 93% of the subjects returned to smoking within 6 months (as documented by the Cochrane Collaboration).Most "vapers" never go back to smoking. We cannot turn our backs on our citizens!"

All I have to do to sign this is ignore the fact that e-liquid is a tobacco product, but that is really besides the point. Two former very similar petitions where sent to the white house. The first one was brushed off with a bogus statement from the FDA. The second one was ignored.

It is unfortunate that people will waste their energy on this petition and are under the illusion they are actually doing something of significance (or doing something that hasn't already been done). It's been done, was shown to be pointless, so lets all move on to something more productive.

Idle is wrong. But please put that enthusiasm and energy someplace where it will do some good. Write a good Letter to the Editor the next time you see a story on e-cigarettes in the local paper. Sign up to receive Calls to Action and then take action. Make an appointment with your local, state, or federal law-makers and talk to them about how Tobacco Harm Reduction (THR) worked for you when nicotine abstinence kept failing.

They changed the required number of signatures from 10,000 to 25,000 just as this one was filed. We blew away the requirement by gathering over 33,000 signatures. We met the requirement well before the deadline of January 14, 2013. Exactly three weeks from today it will be ONE YEAR since we met the requirements, and we have not had any response whatsoever. Not. One. Word.

And shortly after we blew away their darn inflated requirement, they upped it again to TEN TIMES what it started out as. Doesn't that tell you something?

The message I hear is this:

We put up this petition site as a PR stunt to make the populous believe the executive branch is listening and will take action on the wishes of the people. When we discovered the people were asking hard questions, we decided to make it more difficult to meet the requirements. When they continued asking hard questions, we decided to try to make the requirements damn near impossible to meet. Nevertheless, a few have met those requirements.

We should have started a petition for the White House to respond to the last one! I lost faith in the administration after the last one was ignored not not mention other matters. I agree, time to shift our efforts in another direction. Not trying to be a buzz kill but this "we the people thing" turned out to be a dead end for us!

They're bias. I've received lots of notices of "We won!!" from other petitions I've signed over the years, from health problems to false inprisonment issues to save the butterflies. They're never told they have to get more Sigs.. except one, a Veterans one. (To date). Vets & eCigs are being picked on methinks.

Stephen Dinan’s story about the “We the People” petition site has the subheading “Obama is given credit for trying” (“Deport Justin Bieber: White House goes mum on ‘We the People’ petition site,” Web, Jan. 28). Not by former smokers who finally quit by switching to electronic cigarettes.

The first petition on the subject asked the administration to recognize e-cigarettes as an effective alternative to smoking. It was filed on Sept. 27, 2011, when the requirement for receiving White House attention was 5,000 signatures within 30 days.

The response arrived on Dec. 15 and was disappointing, to say the least. The White House had punted to the Food and Drug Administration, which continued to insist that e-cigarettes are not effective.

The second petition was created Jan. 14, 2013, by which time the goal had been raised to 25,000 signatures. The new petition called on the administration to prevent the FDA from banning the sale and use of e-cigarettes by applying all sections of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (“Tobacco Act”) via a deeming regulation.

The goal was reached on the evening of last Feb. 6, and was surpassed, amassing a total of more than 34,000 signatures.

The table in Mr. Dinan’s story shows that one petition was successfully completed in February 2013 and that the White House responded to one. Well, it wasn’t the e-cigarette petition, since nearly a year has passed with no response.